[1] It is located to the south-east of Lublin, north of Zamość and south of Biała Podlaska, some 25 kilometres (16 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

In 1235, Daniel of Galicia granted the town a city charter and moved the capital of his domain in 1241–1272 after destruction of Halych by the Mongols in 1240–1241.

[4] Renamed as Diocese of Chełm–Lublin in 1790, it was suppressed in 1805, but since 2005 Chełm is nominally restored and listed by the Catholic Church as Latin titular bishopric.

It was then that The Golem of Chełm by Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm became famous, but the city declined in the 17th century due to the wars which ravaged Poland.

In the 18th century, the situation in eastern Poland stabilized and the town started to slowly recover from the damages suffered during the Swedish Deluge and the Khmelnytsky uprising.

In the Battle of Chełm of 8 June 1794, the forces of Gen. Józef Zajączek were defeated by the Russians under Valerian Zubov and Boris Lacy, the town was yet again sacked by the invading armies.

The town entered a period of decline as the local administrative and religious offices (including the bishopric) were moved to Lublin.

[6] In September 1918, apostolic visitor Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (future Pope Pius XI) visited the city, greeted by the local Polish population.

On Friday, 1 December 1939, at 8 o'clock, around 2000 Jewish men were driven at dawn to the market-square ("Okrąglak" or "Rynek") surrounded by the German SS formations and local indigenous officials.

[14] In June 1940, during the AB-Aktion, the Germans carried out mass arrests of Poles, who were then imprisoned in Lublin, and then often deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while some were murdered in the region.

[18] Following the 1941 Operation Barbarossa the Germans established the Stalag 319 prisoner-of-war camp in Chełm, in which they imprisoned Soviet, French, British, Italian and other Allied POWs.

[20] From 1942 through to 1945, Chełm was one of numerous locations of the Volhynian massacres of Poles by death squads of OUN-UPA and groups of Ukrainian nationalists.

[23][24] As noted by historians Grzegorz Motyka and Volodymyr Viatrovych, the subject is highly controversial, because in 1944, Roman Shukhevych, leader of OUN-UPA, issued an order to fabricate proofs of Polish responsibility for war crimes committed there.

Chełm became well-known as a butt of Jewish humor thanks to Jewish storytellers and writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Nobel Prize-winning novelist in the Yiddish language, who wrote The Fools of Chelm and Their History (published in English translation in 1973), and the Yiddish poet Ovsey Driz [he; ru; uk; yi] who wrote stories in verse.

[27] Allen Mandelbaum's "Chelmaxioms : The Maxims, Axioms, Maxioms of Chelm" (David R. Godine, 1978) treats the wise men of the Jewish Chełm as scholars who are knowledgeable but lacking sense.

Some Chełm stories emulate the interpretive process of Midrash and the Talmudic style of argumentation,[28] and continue the dialogue between rabbinic texts and their manifestation in the daily arena.

[29][30] The seemingly tangential questioning that is typical of the Chełm Jewish Council can be interpreted as a comedic hint at the vastness of Talmudic literature.

The combination of paralleled argumentation and linguistic commonality allows the Jewish textual tradition, namely Talmudic, to shine through Chełm folklore.

[31] After Poland's independence, the Polish census of 1921 found a population of 23,221, with 12,064 Jews, 9,492 Roman Catholics (Poles), 1,369 Orthodox Christians (Ukrainian, Ruthenians and Belarusians) and 207 Lutherans (Germans).

The flag of Chełm is a rectangle with 2:3 proportions, divided into two parallel, horizontal stripes of the same width (upper – white, lower – green).